SOURCE: Walker, Cheryl. “Nineteenth-Century Women Poets and Realism.” American Literary Realism 23, no. 3 (spring 1991): 25-41.

In the following essay, Walker assesses the works of nineteenth-century female poets as part of the realist tradition.

Since the 1940s, poetry has been virtually excluded from most discussions of realism. One argument against including poetry as a vital element in realism asserts that realism usually involves a type of content and an attitude toward that content, whereas poetry is preeminently a matter of form. “No other kind of writing holds its own words up to the light as poetry does,” states Jan Montefiore,¹ and it is that same linguistic self-consciousness that argues against poetry as a model of realism.

These days poetry has become, if anything, less concerned with what might be referred to in an old-fashioned way as verisimilitude and more concerned with language itself than ever before. (This is a generalization...